Tag Archives: spying

Rachel Maddow loves this story so much she can hardly stand it. Just before the Crash of 1929, a “last bit of Gilded Age Amazement” was announced in the New York Times: The then-new Waldorf-Astoria hotel would include its very own underground rail siding, where the filthy rich could arrive in their private railroad cars and be escorted directly to a special elevator to their suites.
Read more on There’s A Secret Train Station Under The Waldorf-Astoria, And Rachel Maddow Loves It (Video)…

Sheriff Joe Arpaio (seen here crushing the testicles of an invisible immigrant) allegedly, we said allegedly, failed to report an alleged Chinese spy who infiltrated the Arizona Counter Terrorism [sic; seriously, Arizona, buy an AP style book] Information Center. That’s according to ProPublica and the Center for Investigative Reporting, but we heard about this through The Verge, so they get the linky. Grab a fresh cup of coffee, because this story gets deep in a hurry.
Read more on Sheriff Joe Arpaio Allegedly Allows Chinese Hacker To Steal America’s Coolest Secrets…

Amy’s got Machiavellian skillz to pay the proverbial billz, Selina wears a silly hat, and Dan’s heart literally (figuratively) explodes in his chest on this week’s episode of Veep. The whole episode takes place in Jollye Olde Englande, and if you were hoping to hear Jonah’s version of a Cockney accent, you are in so much luck! Veep recap, ahoy!
Read more on Veep Recap: A Field Trip To Merry Olde England…

Spongy-faced Russian Emperor Vladimir Putin did some kind of Face The Motherland forum on his own personal television network, and he had a Very Special Guest: American/Russian hero/traitor Edward Snowden! Snowden began by stating that America’s intelligence-gathering methods are indiscriminate, ineffective, and abusive, then asked Putin if Russia did the same things. According to Slate’s transcript, Putin responded, in part:
“We don’t have a mass system of such interception, and according to our law it cannot exist … [W]e don’t have as much money as they have in the States and we don’t have these technical devices that they have in the States. Our special services, thanks god, are strictly controlled by the society and by the law and are regulated by the law.”
Putin did NOT go on to explain that, on the other hand, of course he personally directs Russia’s police and armed forces to violently squash any hint of civil protest against his government, and of course he’ll just go around slicing off pieces of other countries for Russia to eat in violation of international law, because that would undermine his point about being pretty much the best and sexiest beacon of Law and Freedom. He is a smart dude!
Putin’s reasons for wanting this exchange on television are clear. But what about Snowden’s? Here are three of them, and sorry Team Snowden, none are very flattering to your guy. Read more on Three Possible Explanations For The Snowden-Putin Tele-Potemkin, None Of Them Very Nice (VIDEO)…

Yeah yeah, we know, it’s just so hypocritical of iconic Bond girl Dianne Feinstein to suddenly be acting all hotted up about domestic spying now that she’s the one getting domestic spied on. It’s very ironic and so on, but that’s not the important thing. The important thing is: If you are someone who wants a new Church Committee to ram home a deep, broad, penetrating probe of CIA, NSA, FBI, and all the rest, you should be happy. The chances of that happening just got a lot better.
And boy, it’s about time. To us, the most striking thing about this whole affair has not been the accusations against the CIA, but rather just how badly they’ve handled themselves in response. It’s like when you catch a kid with his hand in the cookie jar, and his reaction is to yell “FUCK YOU! My hand was not in the cookie jar, and even if it was it’s none of your fucking business! DO YOU HEAR ME I WILL CUT YOU! I WILL SHIT IN YOUR SHOES!” In other words, the CIA is very much like Justin Bieber or a 19-year-old son. Read more on CIA Screwed Up So Bad That Biggest Fangirl Dianne Feinstein Yelling At Them Now (VIDEO)…

We tuned in to the president’s “I fixed the NSA you’re welcome” speech just as he was wrapping up the part where he recapped the entire motherlovin history of US surveillance and explicated his very intellectual and nuanced deliberations on freedom and security — where shall the twain meet? For how long? Who pays for the room?
The point is that Obama is like King Solomon, the Bible guy who was like “Yeah slice up that baby, I don’t even care,” and also Hamlet, who was such a goddamn whiner. Oh, is it hard to be president? Sorry bud. How many American flags did Obama have arrayed behind him? Six? You can trust him, guys, there were six American flags.
OK here we go, “concrete and substantive reforms,” this should be good. Read more on Barack Obama Will Reform NSA With Platitudes, American Flags…

Happy Saturday, Wonquistadores! Every week, our web browsers overflow with a fetid slop of stories that were too stoopid to ignore altogether, but not quite worth full posts of their own. Then we mop up the mess and wring out the smelly excess into a big old bucket we call the Derp Roundup. Add grain alcohol, stir, and enjoy!
Read more on Derp Roundup: Your Weekly Tour Of The Terrible…

So here’s one of the weirder “guy uses social media to break news” stories out there: Tom Matzzie, a “clean-energy entrepreneur,” was riding on the Acela between Washington DC and New York, and he overheard some guy talking on his cell phone. Pretty quickly, he realized who the guy was: former NSA director Michael Hayden, giving a series of interviews to reporters “on background,” saying all sorts of unkind things about the Obama administration. And so Matzzie got on his Twitter machine to share what he was hearing. It created something of a sensation, because it’s not every day you overhear a former spy guy reminding somebody — loudly — that he only wants to be identified as “a former senior admin official.”
Matzzie’s one lucky guy. The most interesting conversation we’ve ever overheard on public transportation was a passionate argument about whether a lightsaber could cut through mithril armor. Read more on Former NSA Head’s Private Conversation Revealed When He Shouts It On A Train…

Fun fact: after 9/11, the NYPD created something called a “demographics unit,” devoted to spending time in South Asian and Middle Eastern neighborhoods in New York, New Haven, and various neighborhoods in New Jersey under the supervision of a CIA agent who worked closely with another former CIA agent hired by the NYPD shortly after 9/11.
But don’t worry, the NYPD/CIA officers don’t spy on anyone or anything; they “just” go to mosques so they can “know what they are saying,” and sometimes spend hours in halal markets, bookstores, barbershops, gyms, and restaurants, writing down detailed logs of conversations wherein participants express concern about drone strike frequency in Pakistan, for example, or the ongoing occupation of Afghanistan.
What? Using the CIA to spy on Americans is illegal, you say? And targeting Americans based on their ethnic or racial characteristics violates the 14th Amendment?
First of all, you have a pre-9/11 mindset. And second, they aren’t spying on regular Americans, they are spying on demographic Americans, who are probably up to no good anyways. This is why it is TOTALLY not like when the NYPD had a “black desk” in the ’60s to spy on African Americans:
Read more on Are You On The NYPD’s List Of ‘Demographic Americans’? Are You Brown? Then Yes!…

Well, thank goodness the wingnutosphere has finally found an angle on this NSA story that makes them feel all special and put-upon! In a story that has absolutely nothing to do with the recent flap over PRISM, BLARNEY, and SMERSH, here is the headline — from nominal business site and wingnut clearinghouse “Investor’s Business Daily” — that is finally giving islamophobes a chance to complain that we don’t have ENOUGH domestic spying going on: Obama’s Snooping Excludes Mosques, Missed Boston Bombers. Of course, it’s a complete bait and switch — despite its breathless claim that “the government’s sweeping surveillance of our most private communications excludes the jihad factories where homegrown terrorists are radicalized,” the story is not about the NSA’s collection of phone and internet metadata. Rather, the editorial is upset that the FBI isn’t randomly infiltrating places of worship:
Since October 2011, mosques have been off-limits to FBI agents. No more surveillance or undercover string operations without high-level approval from a special oversight body at the Justice Department dubbed the Sensitive Operations Review Committee.
Shocking! When did Our America start granting special rights like “due process” and “free exercise of religion” to Muslims? Read more on Wingnuts Outraged: Obama Won’t Spy On Muslims Like The Founders Wanted…

First things first: Thank you, Edward Snowden. You made a few more people care that we pawned away some valuable shit that might be tough to get back. (There was some panic buying on Feeling Safer, can you blame us?) Now, maybe our rights, our privacy, and the abuse of secrecy will become, gasp, issues debated in Congress. Anything’s possible!
Now then: Fuck you, Edward Snowden, ur doing it wrong. Yr Wonkette can think of between several and a lot of ways you could have revealed how the NSA is involved in some stuff that all citizens deserve to be informed about, but are not. For example: If we were you, we would have left out your latest “revelation” about how the US is doing spy things in China (cyberly) to gain “access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers.” Read more on Edward Snowden, We Need To Talk…

Hello residents of New York City! (And probably also New Brunswick and parts of Connecticut, Buffalo, and Philadelphia)! Are you doing anything wrong? No? Then why not let Michael Bloomberg’s personal army the NYPD take a look at what you’re doing ALL THE TIME? You don’t mind, do you? After all, if you’re not doing anything WRONG (or emailing OTHER people who might, by some stretch of the imagination, be THINKING about doing something WRONG) then why would you mind? Good, now that this has been settled, you can look forward to the unveiling of the all-seeing “Domain Awareness System” next week, which is not at all Orwellian and given that it was developed via a partnership with Microsoft, has absolutely no security issues! Don’t you feel Safer already?
Read more on The NYPD Just Can’t Keep Its Eyes Off Of You…

Some folks out in Real America who probably have no problem with President Obama’s unchecked expansion of the drone war to kill children in 500 countries or its use of drones to survey the Mexican border or its use of domestic drones everywhere else because this is something we’ve allowed to happen have finally come up with a tangentially related complaint line that fits their fancy: Obama’s liberal EPA is using drones to spy on hard-workin’ ranchers, in Nebraska. “A Nebraska cattlemen’s group is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to stop pollution-control flights over ranches, claiming it amounts to spying on citizens,” MSNBC reports. “EPA, meanwhile, says the flights are an effective way to quickly spot — and stop — pollution from manure lagoons and other waste at large livestock operations.” Wow, it almost seems like this Nebraska cattlemen’s group is cynically using contentious “privacy” grounds to stop the EPA from monitoring all of their violations of the Clean Water Act, doesn’t it? But let’s just say that liberals hate the Heartland instead. Read more on EPA Drones Terrorizing Ranchers Because the EPA Hates the Heartland…

Whoa hey, check out the kewl electric rainbow boat photo. What the hell? This must be how Jesus sees the world when he peers down from the clouds. Is this an Instagram from Jesus? “The U.S. Navy is deploying robot helicopters” — SHIT — “that can spot pirate boats — even when they’re in a crowded sea lane.” And if the robot helicopter, dare we say, somehow fucks up and targets a non-pirate boat for destruction, then… look, these things happen. Those people probably were going to turn pirate at some point anyway. Read more on Robot Helicopters Will Only Be Used To Spy On Pirates, We Swear…

Here’s a crazy thing, as opposed to all the other crazy things: We read those reports about the iPhone tracking your every move and then saving the entire geographic/time details of your daily activities, and we thought Hmm that sounds familiar guess it’s old news and then the editor of Metro Jacksonville wrote and reminded us that we had written about this, on Wonkette, four years ago. But we didn’t actually know for sure, it was just kind of an edumacated guess, based on AT&T’s long record of clandestine surveillance of its customers, so that it can give the government info on you, to put you in FEMA moon camps forever. Read more on Wonkette Told You About iPhone/AT&T Spying On You, Back In 2007…

Way back in 2006, everybody wondered why newly appointed Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn’t let Jane Harman run the House Intelligence Committee, since Harman had been its ranking Democrat through the long Republican Reign of Terror. People assumed it was just ladies hatin’ on other ladies, as is their wont, being so hormonal. But maybe it actually had something to do with this juicy bit of news: that Harman was caught on an NSA wiretap having a very crooked-sounding conversation with a suspected Israeli agent about how to get espionage charges against two AIPAC officials reduced. In other words: catfight. Probably went something like this. [CQ Politics]
Read more on Harman-Pelosi Feud Was Maybe About Dirty Intelligence Matters, Not Hairdos Or Whatever…